say on
witchcraft, in which that subject is treated in the most modern spirit.
The old presumption in favor of the miraculous has fallen completely from
him; his cool, quizzical regard was too much for Satan, who, with all his
knowledge of the world, is easily embarrassed, to endure. The delusion
of witchcraft might be compared to a noxious bacillus. Scott tried to
kill it by heat; he held it up to a fire of indignation, and fairly
boiled it in his scorching flame of reason. Montaigne tried the opposite
treatment: refrigeration. He attacked nothing; he only asked, with an
icy smile, why anything should be believed. Certainly, as long as the
mental passions could be kept at his own low temperature, there was no
danger that the milk of human kindness should turn sour, no matter what
vicious culture of germs it originally held. He begins by saying that he
had seen various miracles in his own day, but, one reads between the
lines, he doesn't believe any of them. One error, he says, begets
another, and everything is exaggerated in the hope of making converts to
the talker's opinion. One miracle bruited all over France turned out to
be a prank of young people counterfeiting ghosts. When one hears a
marvel, he should always say, "perhaps." Better be apprentices at sixty
then doctors at ten. Now witches, he continues, are the subject of the
wildest and most foolish accusations. Bodin had proposed that they
should be killed on mere suspicion, but Montaigne observes, "To kill
human beings there is required a bright-shining {661} and clear light."
And what do the stories amount to?

How much more natural and more likely do I find it
that two men should lie than that one in twelve hours
should pass from east to west? How much more natural
that our understanding may by the volubility of our
loose-capring mind be transported from his place, than
that one of us should by a strange spirit in flesh and
bone be carried upon a broom through the tunnel of a
chimney? . . . I deem it a matter pardonable not to
believe a wonder, at least so far forth as one may explain
away or break down the truth of the report in some way
not miraculous. . . . Some years past I traveled through
the country of a sovereign prince, who, in favor of me
and to abate my incredulity, did me the grace in his own
presence and in a particular place to make me see ten
or twelve prisoners of that kind, and amongst others an